Who's the whinger now?
There have been plenty of skyscrapers planned for the City of London. Most of them are now not being built because of the deregulated banking-driven recession, not environmentalists' protests.
I would have said that claiming countries have been made great by airports is "clutching at straws" - countries are made great by having something to sell in the first place.
And it seems that even though Wren's plans for a regularised grid of streets in London didn't come to pass, our city has gone from strength to strength and people continue to flock here from all over the world. Unlike most people on this site the majority of people who visit this country do not spend most of their time hanging round in airports, so even if Heathrow is not that wonderful a hub it doesn't matter. And unlike HK, London is not obscured beneath a vast brown smog.